Antibiotics resistance worry

Professor Dame Sally Davies, the government's chief medical officer, has warned that antibiotic resistance is a potential "ticking time bomb".

Dame Sally said the danger of resistance to antibiotics could prove to be as serious a threat as terrorism and the government needed to raise the point at April's G8 summit.

She said: "If we don't take action, then we may all be back in an almost 19th Century environment where infections kill us as a result of routine operations. We won't be able to do a lot of our cancer treatments or organ transplants."

"We haven't had a new class of antibiotics since the late 80s and there are very few antibiotics in the pipeline of the big pharmaceutical companies that develop and make drugs," she added.